At the Boston Globe, Leon Neyfakh has a great piece on new kinds of “unions” that are trying to advocate for workers’ rights in an economy where it’s not always clear what exactly defines a “worker” anymore.
They’re simply trying to pin down how employment works in post-industrial America. You don’t have to be a leftist, after all, to acknowledge that, at a time when complex supply chains, outsourcing, and independent contracting have come to dominate the experience of work in the United States, it’s worth taking an honest look at exactly what it now means to be employed—and what the relationship requires of both the employer and the employee. For American workers of all kinds, from music video dancers to football players to short-order cooks, it could be a useful first step toward restoring what was good about working conditions of the past while accommodating the realities of the present.
I think this is exactly right. Promoters of the “gig economy” tend to portray it as ushering in a new kind of labor which is no longer dominated by the employer-employee relationship and thus infertile ground for mass unionization. This may be so, but that hardly means that the power differentials between workers and bosses have evaporated away, or that workers’ economic security has risen in proportion to the number of W-2s they have to report. If anything, workers higher and higher up on the education and skills ladder are increasingly exposed to the kinds of uncertainty, risk, and exploitation that have long characterized informal labor in the economic margins.
Why, then, are so many of the breathless tribunes of startup culture so fond of anti-union libertarianism? One reason seems to be that the most prominent battles fought by unions in the past twenty years have been struggles to protect rights won in the past by vocational groups with less and less influence. As such, unionism is almost universally regarded—even by some of its supporters—as a stodgy institution, fighting to preserve the benefits of older economic victories against a relentlessly onrushing structural change. I don’t think this portrayal is fully or even mostly accurate, but I do think it’s one of the reasons why so many people whose class interests clearly line up with what unions are fighting express either outright hostility to their goals or head-shaking dismissal of their tactics.
But can’t we imagine a unionism that fits with today’s labor? Or, more urgently: aren’t the core goals of unionization—solidarity, aid, advocacy, and empowerment—even more important today than they ever were in the industrial era? One can imagine a case for a kind of unionization that cycles all the way back to the origin’s movement in the mutual aid societies of the late nineteenth century, growing out of communities and social networks as a way to hedge against the savageries of the free market. In a quite radical move, a group of graduate students at Duke has even collectivized their graduate stipends. Short of such an audacious exercise, though, why wouldn’t, for instance, freelance programmers in San Francisco want to band together to buy health insurance and guarantee or subsidize each others’ daycare costs?
Beyond this, why does the shared interest in a union have to be vocational? Couldn’t it be geographical—say, a massively enlarged mandate for the neighborhood association? Or perhaps find its root in the de-territorialized communities formed by electronic communication?
There is, I believe, both a profound libertarianism alongside a latent mutualism in the generation of young workers entering labor force. Sadly the former, driven by the gold rush mentality of startup culture, has prevailed so far. At the same time, however, I think there’s a sense of deep interdependence and co-reliance which has begun to fill in the space left behind by the welfare state and paternal corporatism. Those feelings are the wellsprings, I hope, of a new kind of thinking which might be able to translate unionism into today’s conditions.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2014/04/10/710/